Peeking into the rock

When people gather at this time of year, somebody will surely mention that they saw a whale recently. It spouted and everything. The really lucky ones were out on a boat and saw a whole bunch of them.

Also, suddenly, everybody is either an expert on persimmons or wants to become one and which ones can you eat now, anyway? (The flat kind which is less astringent, the pointy kind has to wait until it is dead soft)

And suddenly, too, everybody wants to know what they can do with all these pumpkins everywhere (you can ask me, I've been eating them all along).

The hillsides in some places have a little color to alleviate the endless gold: bright red leaves on the poison oak. The air quality is different, so that people keep asking when it's going to rain (the answer is, not yet. Some more fires have to happen first).

But the thing I noticed this morning -- the thing that makes walking down the street a different experience, and can make a person feel transported into a better, more beautiful world -- the Monarch butterflies are back for the winter.

I've been traking the dogs to Meder Street Park -- actually "University Terrace Park." It's a good place to go when you have an extra dog because there's a moderately long moderately steep trail that is offleash all the way, which means no handling of two dogs on the leash (both of whom are almost well-behaved but severely undertrained). It's alongside Moore Creek (where I have done observations for Snapshot Day on two (three?) occasions), which is bordered with eucalyptus and a mix of native and invasive understory plants. Chiefly, at this time of year, poison oak, which is in its vine phase there, climbing up the eucalyptus trees (which are a very tall and robust species, the kind Californians actually think of when they say eucalyptus -- probably one of the species that was mistakenly planted in a lot of places to provide wood for railroad ties). The poison oak is very lush right now, all green, with berries, very attractive if you don't know what you're looking at.

Poison oak is a really important plant in several plant communities in California. It has different growth habits depending on the habitat. In the riparian habitat succession, it tends to grow as a shrub before the tall trees grow, and at this point, it provides a protective cover for little baby willows and stuff. When the willows are replaced (normally by oaks and other native trees, but hereabouts the eucalyptus has muscled in), the poison oak becomes a vine that climbs the taller trees. All along, the poison oak provides food for a whole community of animals -- birds and rodents and insects, and everything that eats them.

I think in open parkland the posion oak stays in shrub form like it is at Lighthouse field, forming dense clumps that the animals use for food and shelter.

Poison oak may be a nuisance because of the tashes we get when we touch it, but it's also a vital -- necessary -- part of the landscape. I am lucky in that I have never "gotten poison oak" except possbly this one time when I had slightly red, slightly rashy, slightly swollen skin around my ankles but no itching and it just faded away after a few days. Other people can get amazingly severe reactions.

The part of Moore Creek below the eucalyptus stand has been undergoing an extensive habitat restoration for the last few years. For a long time it looked just awful -- it was all raw and there was landscape cloth everywhere. Now its banks are lush with horsetail and baby cattail plants, and there's blackberries everywhere.

The blackberries in the upper part of the trail are on a different schedule from the ones on the lower part of the trail. In the upper part they are less advanced. I'm not sure they're exactly the same berries. The blossoms and leaves on the upper blackberries are bigger. Sometimes plants do that when they are in shadier areas, though. The blackberries in the lower part are in that stage where there are still many new buds and blossoms but there are also ripening berries. I actually had a substantial snack of small ripe blackberries yesterday! I know that blackberries are early summer treats in some places, but hereabouts the usual peak is in August.

Another observation: to walk from the top of the trail to the bottom and back takes a bit over an hour for me, and I am very fat and slow these days (apparently my reaction to every setback is to eat like a crazy person and huddle in a little heap. But I'm back at work a lot of the time now, so I should be recovering). My back muscles actually do not like pulling so much weight up the hill, so I have to stop and do stretches. So for another person, or myself in better shape, maybe a bit less than an hour? So it's maybe a mile and a half (three kilometers) each way? The steep part is really quite steep. Not steep enough that it's scary to go down, but steep enough to make you have to walk in a somewhat different way going either way. The dogs love that. They love everything about it.